During a press conference at the end of August, Washington DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, made sure to say “thank you” – in her own way – for Donald Trump’s influx of federal law enforcement in the nation’s capital.
“We greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” Bowser said. She admitted that, after a recent meeting with the president, his knowledge of DC had “significantly increased” since his first term in the White House.
Bowser pointed to recent data that shows a significant drop in violent crime, particularly carjackings, since more federal law enforcement began working with DC police. But she also offered some pushback.
“What we know is not working is a break in trust between police and community,” Bowser said. “We know having masked Ice agents in the community has not worked, and national guards from other states has not been an efficient use of those resources.” She also underscored that if there were more local police officers, it would cancel out any need for any supplemental federal law enforcement.
The president has spent years denigrating DC. After leaving office in 2021, and mounting his re-election campaign, he called the district “horribly run” and a “nightmare of murder and crime”. In August, he justified his “crime emergency” – after a former Doge staffer was attacked in DC – by describing the “bloodshed, bedlam and squalor” of the nation’s capital. He has also falsely claimed that violent crime in the district is the “worst it’s ever been”, despite it reaching a 30-year low in 2024, according to data compiled by the justice department.
Trump promised repeatedly to “take over” DC on the campaign trail. Then, on 7 August, he started to send hundreds of federal agents to the capital to work with local law enforcement. Just days later, he declared a “public safety emergency”, allowing him to federalize the MPD for 30 days . He supplemented all of this by deploying the DC national guard. Now, about 2,300 national guard troops are patrolling the district – including several hundred sent from Republican-run states.
Bowser did not denounce the move. Instead, she called it “unsettling” and said that it resembled an “authoritarian push” on a Zoom call with local organizers.
Expressing deference to the president, while displaying a quiet pushback against his policies, is emblematic of the tightrope Bowser, who is the second-longest-serving mayor in DC’s history and is eyeing a fourth term, has been walking since Trump returned to office this year.
It’s a far cry from her past willingness to undermine the president publicly. In 2020, during the height of the George Floyd racial justice protests that swept the country, the mayor called Trump a “scared man” on social media, as he tried to quell the demonstrations in the capital.
She also called his use of federal law enforcement officials and national guard at the time an “invasion of our city” before announcing that a section of 16th Street, which is in front of the White House, would be renamed “Black Lives Matter Plaza” – with the road’s new name painted in tall yellow letters on the ground.
When Trump returned to office, the pressure from the president and congressional Republicans to rename and pave over the plaza, or risk losing federal funding, forced Bowser’s hand in March. “We have bigger fish to fry,” she said of her decision to comply with the administration’s demands. “Now our focus is on making sure our residents and our economy survives.”
Arguably, it signaled a new dawn in her ongoing power struggle with the president.
Her apparent cooperation, including a recently signed executive order that ensures cooperation between MPD and federal officers indefinitely, has earned her praise from the administration. Trump congratulated Bowser’s compliance in a post from Truth Social. “Wow! Mayor Muriel Bowser of D.C. has become very popular because she worked with me and my great people in bringing CRIME down to virtually NOTHING in D.C,” the president wrote.
On Monday, he also suggested that the mayor was more aligned with the administration’s goals than he had previously thought. “That’s not her ideology, but now I think that maybe is her ideology,” he said, while giving remarks at the Museum of the Bible in DC. “She’s taking a lot of heat from the radical left.”
But Bowser’s apparent willingness to work with Trump has elicited frustration from members of the DC council. In a post on Twitter/X, the at-large council member Robert White pushed back against the mayor’s choice to credit federal officers in the capital.
“This is trampling on democracy in real time, on our watch,” he said. “Sometimes we want to wait and see what’s happening, but that time has passed.” White later issued a statement that called for the rescission of the mayor’s order, calling it a “permission slip” that Trump was using to justify sending forces into other Democratic-led cities.
“I wish there was greater resistance in this moment,” said Zachary Parker, a DC council member who represents Ward 5, which spans the Northeast quadrant of the district.
“The mayor has been conciliatory to the president from the day she went to Mar-a-Lago to greet him to now – and look where we are,” he said.
For longtime DC political analysts like Tom Sherwood, Bowser is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
While he notes that her public appearances, like the late August press conference, could have more “vinegar”, Sherwood also says that language is only part of the dance – Bowser is ultimately forced to bend to the whims of a mercurial president who has a majority in both chambers of Congress.
“The mayor has to consider pushing back where she can and not provoking even more attacks from this president, whose mind is like a weather vane when it comes to his attention to the district,” he said. “Both legally and politically, she doesn’t have the power to stop him.”
Although DC does have limited self-governance, Congress is ultimately in charge of the district. Meanwhile, the president is allowed to keep both federal agents and national guard troops in the capital for as long as he deems necessary.
“Every political person I’ve spoken to who doesn’t like what the mayor is doing can’t answer one question,” Sherwood said. “If you were mayor, with the limited power you had, what would you have done differently?”
Many progressives in DC argue that Bowser is playing too nice, and isn’t reflecting the fact that almost 80% of DC residents oppose the takeover, according to a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll.
While there isn’t any recent polling to show how the impact of the federal takeover has affected the mayor’s approval among DC locals, in May, 53% of residents were happy with Bowser’s job leading the district – a marked improvement from 46% the year prior. But the mayor has failed to reach the crest of approval ratings she received in the first five years of her tenure, which began in 2014.
Recently, more than a hundred groups, local organizations and unions signed an open letter to Bowser, saying that her actions since 11 August had appeased Trump. “History is calling upon you to lead our people, not to cower in the face of an authoritarian who does not have our best interests in mind,” the letter reads.
Related: ‘Free DC’: the group leading fight against Trump’s Washington takeover
Ultimately, the mayor has to play the long game when handling the administration, according to a DC government source familiar with the mayor’s thinking. “We’re only eight months into this. There’s a lot of time left on the clock. DC’s only tool in the toolbox is soft power,” the source said. “Her only job is to protect the residents of Washington DC. She’s going to use whatever strategy is going to yield the best result for that specific mission.”
Trump’s police takeover expired on 10 September, and the US House is not expected to vote on an extension – a sign that there might be a payoff to Bowser’s strategy.
But, for Michael Fanone, the former DC police officer who has chronicled his work helping to defend the Capitol during the January 6 attack, it’s not as simple as hoping that Trump’s focus on the district will wane.
“I don’t think we can say whether or not we know definitively that he’s off her back. I think that you see he’s moved on to another shiny object,” he said, referring to the surge of federal immigration agents in Chicago, and the president’s repeated threats to deploy national guard troops to the city. “Quite frankly, this isn’t just a local fight.”
While the governors of blue states, like California’s Gavin Newsom, Illinois’s JB Pritzker and Maryland’s Wes Moore, have all taken vocal stands against the president, Sherwood recognizes that Bowser can’t risk the same ferocity. “I think she has made the calculation that most DC citizens will support her effort trying to battle Trump without the weapons other governments have,” he said.
